Nvidia does better than expected

While an Nvidia graphics chip seems to be hanging the office laptop's Outlook, the company has seen its quarterly revenue surge more than 50 percent for the second straight quarter and beat expectations.

Apparently it is seeing rising demand for its graphics chips and strength in rapidly growing areas such as self-driving systems and artificial intelligence.

The company also forecast revenue of $1.90 billion, plus or minus two percent, for the current quarter, marginally higher than the $1.88 billion the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street predicted.

Revenue in the company's graphics processing units business, which contributes more than three-quarters to its total revenue, rose 57 percent to $1.85 billion in the fourth quarter.

Revenue at the company's fast-growing data center business, which counts Amazon's Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Groups cloud business among its customers, more than tripled to $296 million in the quarter.

The business is also expected to grow sequentially, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said on a conference call.

Revenue in Nvidia's automotive business, which produces the DRIVE PX 2 self-driving system used by Tesla Inc, reported a 37.6 percent rise to $128 million.

Analysts had expected revenue of $135.3 million from the business.Nvidia's total revenue rose to $2.17 billion from $1.40 billion, beating the average analyst estimate of $2.11 billion.